China-Based AI tool
A China-based company released a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered penetration testing tool, and it has attracted nearly 11,000 downloads on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository; consequently, security researchers worry attackers could repurpose it for malicious purposes.
Dubbed Villager, the framework appears to come from Cyberspike, which markets the tools as a red teaming solution that automates testing workflows. Researchers traced the package to PyPI in late July 2025, when a user named stupidfish001 — a former capture the flag (CTF) player for the Chinese HSCSEC team — uploaded it.
“The rapid, public availability and automation capabilities create a realistic risk that Villager will follow the Cobalt Strike trajectory: commercially or legitimately developed tooling becoming widely adopted by threat actors for malicious campaigns,” Straiker researchers Dan Regalado and Amanda Rousseau said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
The emergence of Villager follows Check Point’s disclosure that threat actors are trying to leverage another nascent AI-assisted offensive security tool called HexStrike AI to exploit recently disclosed security flaws.
With the advent of generative AI (aka GenAI) models, threat actors have exploited the technology for social engineering, technical, and information operations, and these efforts have likely increased speed, access to expertise, and scalability.
Moreover, relying on such tools lowers the barrier to exploitation and shortens the time and effort required to launch attacks. What once required highly skilled operators and weeks of manual development now can run through AI automation, giving bad actors help with crafting exploits, delivering payloads, and even setting up infrastructure.
“Exploitation can be parallelized at scale, with agents scanning thousands of IPs simultaneously,” Check Point noted recently. “Decision-making becomes adaptive; failed exploit attempts can be automatically retried with variations until successful, increasing the overall exploitation yield.”
Because Villager ships as an off-the-shelf Python package, attackers can easily integrate the tool into their workflows, Straiker noted, calling it a “concerning evolution in AI-driven attack tooling.”
CyberSpike
Cyberspike first appeared in November 2023, when someone registered the domain “cyberspike[.]top” under Changchun Anshanyuan Technology Co., Ltd., an AI company that reportedly operates in China. However, researchers found the only public description of the company on a Chinese talent services platform called Liepin, which raises questions about who actually stands behind it.
Snapshots of the domain that the Internet Archive captured show the tool’s marketing as a network attack simulation and post-penetration test tool designed to help organizations evaluate and strengthen their cybersecurity posture.
Once researchers installed Cyberspike, they found it incorporated plugins that function as components of a remote access tool (RAT), which enable invasive victim surveillance and control — including remote desktop access, Discord account compromise, keystroke logging, webcam hijacking, and other monitoring functions. Further analysis revealed similarities with a known RAT called AsyncRAT.
“Cyberspike integrated AsyncRAT into its red teaming product, with additional plugins to well-known hacktools like Mimikatz as well,” Straiker said. “These integrations demonstrate how Cyberspike repackaged established hacktools and offensive tools into a turnkey framework designed for penetration testing and probably malicious operations.”
Villager appears to represent Cyberspike’s latest offering. As a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client, it integrates Kali Linux toolsets, LangChain, and DeepSeek’s AI models to automate testing workflows, manage browser-based interactions, and issue commands in natural language that the system then converts into technical equivalents.
Besides leveraging a database of 4,201 AI system prompts to generate exploits and make real-time decisions in penetration testing, the AI-native penetration testing framework automatically spins up isolated Kali Linux containers for network scanning, vulnerability assessment, and penetration testing, and then destroys them after 24 hours, effectively erasing traces of the activity.
“The ephemeral nature of these containers, combined with randomized SSH ports, makes AI-powered attack containers difficult to detect, complicating forensic analysis and threat attribution,” the researchers noted.
The framework uses a FastAPI interface to process incoming tasks for command-and-control (C2), while the Python-based Pydantic AI agent platform standardizes outputs.
“Villager reduces skill and time required to run sophisticated offensive toolchains, enabling less-skilled actors to perform more advanced intrusions,” the researchers said. “Its task-based architecture, where AI dynamically orchestrates tools based on objectives rather than following rigid attack patterns, marks a fundamental shift in how cyber attacks are conducted.”
“Increased frequency and speed of automated reconnaissance, exploitation attempts, and follow-on activity could raise detection and response burdens across the enterprise.”
“Its task-based architecture, where AI dynamically orchestrates tools based on objectives rather than following rigid attack patterns, marks a fundamental shift in how cyber attacks are conducted.”
Source: TheHackerNews
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